‘Cats’ Composer Andrew Lloyd Webber Hated the Movie so Much, He Got a Dog
No one hates the Cats movie more than the man who made the music. The composer has already made his opinion about the 2019 movie clear, but it turns out Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Cats movie reaction went further than just not liking it. In a new interview, Webber revealed he hated Cats so much, he got a dog. Woof.
Andrew Lloyd Webber’s ‘Cats’ movie reaction was… not good
Cats the musical is a Broadway classic. It’s one of those shows you either love or you hate. There’s not much in-between. But the Cats movie, on the other hand… the general consensus is that it’s just not good. And Webber agrees. He told Variety the only good part about the Cats movie musical was that it landed him with a cute new pet. And his main critique is that the film’s creators didn’t see to care about getting a good understanding of the music.
“Cats was off-the-scale all wrong,” he said. “There wasn’t really any understanding of why the music ticked at all. I saw it and I just thought, ‘Oh, God, no.’ It was the first time in my 70-odd years on this planet that I went out and bought a dog. So the one good thing to come out of it is my little Havanese puppy.”
And his review gets worse. Webber registered his dog as an emotional support animal and cited Cats as the source of his emotional trauma. He said:
“I wrote off and said I needed him with me at all times because I’m emotionally damaged and I must have this therapy dog. The airline wrote back and said, ‘Can you prove that you really need him?’ And I said ‘Yes, just see what Hollywood did to my musical Cats. Then the approval came back with a note saying, ‘No doctor’s report required.’”
Andrew Lloyd Webber thinks the ‘Cats’ movie was ‘ridiculous’
The Cats movie is an intense fever dream at best and a truly bonkers film adaptation of a musical. Its biggest critiques are about director Tom Hooper’s incomprehensible choice to make the cats look like humans with CGI, the horrifying cockroach-with-human-faces dance number, and the fact that the cats are completely out of scale with the world around them.
Webber thinks had Hooper looped in people from the original Cats team on the film, it wouldn’t have flopped so hard.
“The problem with the film was that Tom Hooper decided, as he had with Les Mis, that he didn’t want anybody involved in it who was involved in the original show,” the Phantom of the Opera creator told the U.K.’s Sunday Times in 2020. “The whole thing was ridiculous.”
It’s important to note that Webber named his dog Mojito. Because everyone needs a drink after watching that movie.
